The pastor asked me to play guitar and lead the hymn 'Be Thou My Vision' at yesterday's Lenten service. After having five St Patrick's Day Parades, we were all feeling kinda Celtic, and this hymn is Celtic.

I read that to my husband, and he said "What?!" So out it went, along with extraneous capital letters and any non-standard punctuation. The goal is for everybody to sing.

The tune now, is not what I would call a folk tune. For one thing, it has a range of an octave plus a third. You know, a lot of people think that five notes are enough for a song. (Somewhere on the Mudcat is an impressive list of famous songs with only five notes to them.) 'Slane' has eleven notes.

Then there's the timing. I typed the song out and put the chords on it, and it just didn't seem to go. It was lumpy, with chords in funny places. When that happens, it often means that somebody didn't write pick-up notes as pick-ups, but that didn't seem to be the answer here.

The Catholics (Lord of all Hopefulness) and the Lutherans thought Slane was in 3/4 time, but the CyberHymnal thought 4/4. I tried both. Then I tried making it a crooked tune. That didn't seem to help either.

So finally I went for 6/4. I've played 6/4 before, and I'm comfortable with it. 6/4 seems to be used when a song is 'talky' or uneven. For example, one measure might go LA-la-la LA-la-la while the next goes TUM-ty TUM-ty TUM-ty. (It's used for other things as well.)

However, there was one measure that wouldn't co-operate. The words to it are 'day and by ni-ight,' and when I tried to play it, my left hand got stuck on the fretboard and didn't want to move. And try as I might I couldn't sing the next note - it refused to come to my mind. Strange!

I found that if I lengthened the last syllable of 'night,' I could finish the song. The meter doesn't allow for that at all, but without it I was getting nowhere. I've decided that there is an invisible, magic dot on that note, probably put there by leprechauns, and if you want to play 'Slane,' you must acknowledge it.

There's a recording of 'The Ancient Hill of Slane' on a cylinder recording mad in the early years of the last century by Irish piper George McCarthy. I may shed some light (compared to written versions)

And of course there are two versions of the tune: "Be Though My Vision" (10 10 10 10 Dactyl) and "Lord of All Hopefulness" (10 11 11 12) which aren't interchangeable. "Complete Mission Praise" gives completely different chord sequences for the versions (apart from different keys, E and D respectively). I've never come across it in anything other than 3/4, though as the tune should be sung almost as sean nos, you're going to lose a bit if you've got a guitar accompaniment.

That was one of the hymns used at Hamish Henderson's funeral - with about 1000 folkies in the church the sound was awe-inspiring. The straight Hymns A&M version, you don't try any revisions with that many people who all know it.

It's also the tune to Lakes of Champlain as sung by Martin Simpson. He identifies it as a New England version of Lakes of Coolfin/Coalfin. He also says the New England version of the song can be heard on Margaret MacArthur's CD Make the Wildwood Ring.

It wouldn't play for me either. I simply got a box offering to save it to disk. I have had this before on Mudcat and someone commented on another thread that they thought it was something to do with the way the Mudcat server is set up.

I don't know, but I had not long played a midi from the concertina.net Tune-O-tron OK, so I suspect it is not your system at fault.

If you right click on the link you can save the file to your hard drive and it should play there OK. That's what I did.

It plays OK on my computer and I normally have bother with youtube stuff. I had to have more memory added a few months back because I kept getting those messages. BTW Be thou my vision was my favourite hymn when I was a kid - here in good old NZ back in the 50s. And we sang it at High school assemblies too. Robyn

A thought. Once you have it downloaded you can import the midi into Noteworthy and see what it produces.

A second thought. Old tunes don't always conform to our modern notion of barred music. I play quite a lot of Renaissance music on the recorder and we play from modern editions. The originals were unbarred and the rhythm does not always fit neatly to modern barred format and you get a lot of notes tied across barlines. The phrasing in such music does not always fit neatly into a definite number of bars so the strong beat is not always at the beginning of a bar.

This is the Church Hymnary version - not sure the ending is quite the way I remember it, but the metre is the same, i.e. unvarying triple time. This is a modern tune in the hymn repertoire, so it would have been barred from the start.

"The Melody is found in Patrick W Joyce's "Old Irish Folk Music and Songs" 1909 No 323, to the words 'With my love on the road'. The form given there corresponds with that at RS 531 (Lord of All Hopefulness) except that lines 3 and 4 each begin with a quaver.

The melody was first associated with 'Be thou my vision' in the Irish 'Church Hymnal' 1919, ......; it rapidly achieved popularity despite the difficulty congregations often found in fitting the syllables of the original irregular form of the text. 'Lord of all hopefulness', written for the tune and published in 'Songs of Praise' enlarged 1931, boosted its popularity further.

Unusually for a folk-tune, there is no melodic repitition, but typically Irish are the wide compass and the ending on the three repeated key-notes. Erik Routley's harmonization was made for 'Congregational Praise' 1951.

......

The metre varies, according to the words used......"

Of the words:

"The original Gaelic hymn, of which this is a much-altered translation, dates back at least to the tenth century, and possibly earlier......"

Hello, Tootler. It's interesting to hear from someone else who plays Renaissance music. I'm convinced that 'Slane' is more modern than that, however. By that I mean merely that it doesn't sound like a 16th or 17th C. piece to me.

We have quite a few crooked tunes in our hymnal. This means that the measures do not all have the same number of beats. However, when a tune is crooked, there is some sense to it. Perhaps one measure in a 4/4 tune is in 6/4. Or vice versa. With 'Slane' I couldn't work out anything like that.

The earliest reference to it is the 1909 book that Dave MacKenzie just mentioned. The editor considered it old, so I suspect the tune came from the late 18th C or earlier in the 19th.

Some people say it's a song in 3/4 time. This doesn't handle the four E's in a row at one point and the four beats in Bm at another. (I've changed the key to D for easier guitar accompaniment.)

As I mentioned above, I've seen it in 3/4 and in 4/4, so it is not an obvious tune.

Somebody mentioned that there is a wax cylinder recording of it, but I couldn't find it online. It would be interesting to hear.

The UK comic 2000AD had a strip entitled "Slaine", a warrior in the Conan style. A filk was inevitable.

Slaine stands alone 'gainst the murderous horde, Who attack him on horseback, with axe & with sword. With bare hands and feet he will fight for what's right. He may be a hero, but he's not all that bright.

Slaine's home is SouthWest, and a long way away. So he follows the sun in its course through the day. His way he plots clear t'ward the pole star each night. As I may have mentioned, he's not all that bright.

Although Bert Lloyd was known to use traditional tunes in order to allow sets of words to be sung, I don't think it went as far as 'nicking' and, in this case, the tune he used for "The Banks of the Bann" is the one used most often in the north of Ireland for "The Banks of the Bann".

And if they ever give you a copy of Mission Praise, be careful with their version, because you need to think a bit to fit it at the beginning of the lines. A&M New Standard (the red book) seems to fit ok.

See, Dave knows what I'm talking about. Teasing the humans by making them drop certain words and add others to 'Slane' is just what they had in mind all along.

For the recent St. Patrick's Day celebration I hung a banner on my front door with art from the Book of Kells. Now I wonder if leprechauns were behind the poor creatures twisted into knots in the art of that era.

Listening to Nic Jones sing "The Lakes of Shilin" yesterday, the melody did sound familiar. This is of course another song of the "Lakes of Coolfin" family. I have heard John Doyle sing one of these songs also at one of his concerts with Mike McGoldrick and John McCusker. Martin Simpson may be right, or it may be that these melodies all derive from the same root which is much older. Its almost as ubiquitous as Dives and Lazarus/Gilderoy/Star of County Down/Kingsfold, which made it into hymnals at around the same time.

When ever I have played the version which omits the extra notes given in the tune of 'Lord of hopefulness' version of slane (so it fits with the words), congregations still try and sing these extra notes because they know the tune of 'Lord of hopefulness' so well and expect the words of 'Be though my vision' to fit.

Unfortunately it usually ends in confusion for those singing unless they have rehearsed. The annoying thing is that everyone thinks it's the organist fault!

The solution is to always use the version of the words for 'Be thou my vision' that fit the exact tune of 'Lord of hopefulness'.

Lighter - the tune referred to in the posts above from Joyce was not his Banks of the Bann tune (#556, which you linked), but the tune for With My Love On The Road (#323), which is the Slane tune.

I had a quick look in Roud for versions of The Banks of The Bann, which I'm taking as Roud 889 - The Brown Girl (there are 2 others with The Banks of the Bann title - 2495, 3473) for versions with music, of which there were 9 (full tune). They all seem to have been notated relatively recently - I think Barry's in JAFL 18, 1909 might be the earliest. I had a look at 5 of them - Barry, Huntington (SotP), Peacock(SotNO), Shields (SRaT) and Creighton (MFS). Of these only Eddie Butcher's version in SRaT used the Slane tune. (The tune in Creighton is lovely though!)

When I looked for Banks of the Bann and Joyce it returned a text of RN3473 from his Ballad Sheet Scrapbooks, but not the tune.

I've had a listen to another audio recording. Joseph Higgins (Brackalislea , Derry) recorded it for the BBC in 1953 using a Slane tune (amazon Uk sample").

Other audio versions listed in Roud were recorded in Ireland - Robert Cinnamond, William Coulter in the 50s, Malachy Clerkin 70s and Mick Hoy (undated), the others are from US and Canada (total 18 results including duplicates).

I just listened to the samples for Banks of the Bann (ignoring possible other titles) available in Amazon uk digital and of the 35 or so artists (all except Joseph Higgins modern recordings I think) and all but about 4 used the Slane tune. So it seems to be the most popular tune now in the British Isles.

Really??? Its one of the best known hymn tunes there is, even if you never set foot in a church, you must have experienced it at school assembly. Or caught the tail end of Songs of Praise.

The reason it is a well known hymn tune is that most hymn tunes are either deathly dull late 19th century ones, or totally unsingable late 20th century ones. The best ones usually have a folk origin, be it Northern European (as in those from Piae Cantiones), or British and Irish, many arranged for hymns by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Was "Lord of all hopefulness" ever included in CoE/Anglican/Episcopalian hymnbooks outside the US? I was brought up CoE in England and Anglican in NZ, and the first I heard of it was here, though I've known "Be Thou My Vision" since I was aged in single digits.

I remember singing Lord of All Hopefulness in school assemblies in the 1960s. I am sure that we used Songs of Praise (edited by Dearmer, Shaw and Vaughan Williams). And indeed the current version of Hymns Ancient and Modern assigns copyright to Songs of Praise (although authorship to Joyce Placzek, known as Jan Struther). And I am pretty sure that we used Songs of Praise in the church in our village at the same time. I think we considered that both Ancient and Modern, and the English Hymnal, were too High Church (though the latter of course had the same editors). So I think the answer, Jack, is yes it was, in schools and low churches.

And a bit of info as to how that hymn got to be in Songs of Praise, between 1929 and 1931 it was decided that the book needed enlarging, so an enlarged committee was set up to do this, and one of the additional members was a Mrs. Maxtone Graham, the married name at the time of Jan Struther, the hymn's author. According to Wikipedia the new enlarged edition was also the first hymn book to include Morning has Broken.

In the Australian Hymn Book, our copy is the 1977 edition, Lord of all Hopefulness is in there, but the set tune is a different tune. Slane is in there also, set to a more recent hymn, Lord of Creation to you be all Praise. That hymn book is ecumenical, but the Anglican Churches in Australia, in News South Wales in particular, tend to be very low (evangelical).

Yes I have, leenia. My wife is a church organist as it happens. And what happens is that preachers, unfamiliar with music, choose the hymns on the basis of the text alone. It being a Methodist church, we get loads by Charles Wesley. Wesley never wrote any music as far as I know, and most of the tunes to his hymns were written long after his death. Ok, you get an occasional gem by Mendelssohn, but many, many of those tunes are extremely dull. Apart from the Welsh ones. And then you get modern hymns which are not metrical. So unless you know it, or you have a melody line edition of the hymnal (often not available) and are really rather good at sightreading, you have no chance. Matt Redman is one of the writers I am complaining about I guess.

So what happens, is, a preacher chooses a hymn. My wife plays the music in the book, but nobody can follow, and nobody sings, because they don't know it and they don't have the music in their book. Then, to add insult to injury, the preacher apologises afterwards, saying to my wife: "yes that one really is quite difficult to play, isn't it". When she has played it, maybe not perfectly but certainly adequately.